I've always daydreamed of one day getting married and settling into a modest and preferably cheap house somewhere, good enough for starting out. Something like one-bedroom, one-bathroom flat similar to those of small families in Japan. We can have maybe a tv and a small refrigerator, a stove and a washing machine, and maybe also a desktop computer. A small Christmas tree during the holidays. Just the essentials.
Then we'd work our way up. First save up for a better tv, so that neither my husband nor I get cranky when the old, cheap one conks out after a long day. Then we get maybe a nice couch or a sturdier washing machine. Or maybe even a slow cooker so that whoever's turn it is (I'm going to insist that me and my husband take turns preparing dinner) won't have to stress about getting it ready before the other comes home. Of course, we'll certainly have to set some money aside for a car. Nothing fancy, something like a Hyundai Accent or a Kia Rio, maybe if we're lucky a Honda Civic. Just something that'll get us to work without the hassle of public transportation.
Then, hopefully, once we've been promoted enough (me as senior professor in UP lol and my husband as, well, whatever high position) or once we have enough money in the bank, we can start planning a baby. We're going to need a yaya for her (for now I'll assume in my fantasies that our firstborn is a girl). We might start getting a little crowded, but in the meantime the yaya can sleep in the couch. And then, after we've adjusted to the new arrangement, and when the child starts getting a little bit too old to sleep with mommy and daddy, we might find it necessary to move into a bigger house. Of course, we would have prepared for that from the start (which is why we first had to get promoted enough and had to have enough money in the bank).
So then we move to a bigger place, maybe a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house in a decent subdivision, still quite modest, but good enough for a growing family. Our daughter will have to start attending school by this time. And maybe we might have to invest in an educational plan for our baby so we wouldn't have to worry about paying for her high school education when the time comes. Must think in the long term.
And maybe, after settling in, we might think of adding another blessing to the family, anyway there's room enough in the house for two little children now. Hopefully it's a boy this time so that we can end there.
And in between all these there are Christmas visits to my parents and Holy Week visits to his, we never miss those.
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In real life, of course, it probably won't happen that way. But I notice that I really do fancy that domestic fantasy I've outlined above. Sometimes, walking along the kitchen ware section of Abenson, I find myself searching for the sturdiest-looking cheap stove I can find and think to myself, that'd be okay for our little house. Or when I wander into the electronics section of Western, I start to think, that small tv is perfectly fine, as long as we still enjoy what we're watching.
Even in the Sims, whenever I create a new family, I tend to avoid the motherlode cheat and try to play them from the bottom up, using money they've earned to get better furniture, to renovate the house, get rich and make babies.
But I really do wonder though how my life will turn out. At the moment it's pretty scary. What if I make the wrong choices? What if I don't get to achieve my goals? What if I don't become good enough a professor or an economist to succeed? I might never get to that point where me and my family get to save up enough for a bigger house (knowing more or less that Filipinos have a bad record when it comes to savings--very low relative savings rate). Our earnings might only get eaten away by bills and taxes. I remember, now that I've realized it, that sometimes I get a figure in my head, like P15,000/mo. How much would the water and electricity bill cost for a small house...Will P5,000 be enough for all the bills? Will we be able to save at least P2,000 a month??
Ugh. I'm such a geek. But seriously, these things do bother me once in a while. And it's kind of frightening that I don't have any definite answers.
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As usual, watch out for spoilers.
When I finished this book and came out of my room, I must have had this sullen look on my face because when my mom saw me she said, "it's that depressing?" And it came to me that "depressing" is not the word to describe Lord of the Flies. It was troubling and disturbing, but not depressing. I suspect that what made it that way was the fact that they were all children. Twelve at the oldest.
Two thirds of the way through the book I no longer wanted to continue. I didn't want to know what was going to happen, because Golding rendered it in such a way that what was about to happen was so tangible that it seemed as though I already knew and was dreading it.
But despite all that, I liked it. Especially the fact that towards the end, I could almost taste the worst to unravel that any other ending would have been a surprise, and in fact it was. My point: the ending was unexpected, but made very much sense. And after all that knowing-what-was-going-to-happen-and-dreading-it, Golding still managed to surprise me with the way things played out.
Halfway through the book, I was wondering to myself why it was entitled Lord of the Flies. And after I encountered the actual lord of the flies in the story, I still wondered. It wasn't important an image enough to deserve to be the name of the entire book. But after a while it rolled into place. They were a swarm of flies. They wouldn't listen. They weren't being rational. They were frustrating. They deteriorated slowly into savages, violent, uncivilized and crazy. Children, innocent and young that they are, are not exempt from the darkness that taints man. I think that was the message.
I can't help but wonder what clamor this must have caused back when it was first published. (Hy dad's copy was published 1973).
I think I'm glad to be running back to the subtle Tracy Chevalier after such an in-your-face book such as this one. ^^
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